I like the way Wayne says that Obama was "installed as editor of the Harvard Law Review" as if the commies/aliens/satanists funded by that multi-billion dollar international cabal ACORN, who have infiltrated the top-tier law schools of America, grabbed some random guy off the street and sat him at the desk.

The same way the commies/aliens/satanists funded by that multi-billion dollar international cabal ACORN, who have infiltrated the US electoral college, manipulated the vote to make it look as if that same random guy had actually been chosen by a majority of the people who voted!

Amazing. And I had a poem about thunder written in my notebook that very same week! It had to be a message from Thor.

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When all of Cinderella's finery changed back at midnight, why didn't the shoes disappear? What's up with that?

This is a response to an email I received from Wayne (regarding his accusation that we are "a corporate evil" - incapable of thinking for ourselves).

Wayne, just because I have violent disagreements with you over theological/philosophical issues does NOT, in any way, mean that I am part of some "corporate evil". On the contrary, I am HAPPY to disagree with a group when I find it necessary (such as with the moderation you are currently experiencing). I personally, am opposed to it. But I respect the moderators decisions b/c this is THEIR forum! How's that for "corporate evil"!? Besides, couldn't we also accuse you of a corporate religious evil, then too?

Thus, your accusation falls quite short.

Secondly, name calling (ad hominem - another logical fallacy) does NOT help your case either. If you really want to validate your belief in Yahweh (i.e. - and demonstrate that you actually care whether your beliefs are true), then you'll need to 1) stop resorting to logical fallacies, 2) address questions directly - instead of dodging or shifting gears, and 3) support your claims with actual extraordinary evidence - and not just anecdotal or coincidental vague notions (i.e. - How do you tell the difference between a rare event and a "miracle"?).

The fact that you took the bible on assumption ("faith"), just as Muslims take the Koran "on faith" (assumption) speaks volumes, and many want to know how it is you think you can maintain intellectual honesty while continue that assumption uncritically. Again, we CAN change our minds (just as many of us ALREADY have in the past). However, that change is not going to come about by gullibility or "faith" (b/c faith is not a pathway to truth). It is going to require solid evidence (just like YOU would require from a fast talking salesman at the door).

As you are all aware, Wayne has been placed on a high level of moderation, and the Mods will only be approving responses from him that directly address outstanding questions.

Rather than provide these answers, Wayne appears to be trying to continue his preaching via PM, in what could be considered an attempt to circumvent his moderated status.

I have advised Wayne that I will not be engaging with him via PM. I would strongly suggest that everyone else gives him a similar message - if he can continue to engage via PM there is no incentive for him to comply with his in-topic moderation.

What a wonderful idea that we, here, are a corporate evil! The only thing we all have in common is believing in one less god than Wayne. The fact that we individually reject his claims from his stories merely means that they don't meet even a basic standard from credibility for all the reasons we have told him.

As a matter of fact I wonder how many people on the board actually know another member apart from this board - very few I suspect. So any idea that there is corporate effort is nonsense.

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No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

Wayne is experiencing the exact same problem/headache that I ran into when I was a Christian apologist for over 15 years. He is experiencing that hard-brick-wall called...REALITY. What is this reality? It is the realization that his beliefs (which he assumed from childhood) are untenable, indefensible, and irrational. The implications of this realization are staggering for a religious person's life. It is like investing all of your money in a stock (such as Enron) and when the stock starts tanking, your first line of defense is denial, followed by irrational defense of your investment, followed by realization and great pain/sorrow.

Whether or not Wayne will ever admit that his beliefs are based on logical fallacies and credulity is to be determined, but inwardly, I believe he knows this (strongly), and it hurts. It REALLY SUCKS to be shown that the belief system which you based your entire life upon is irrational. It hurts bad. And that is why he has to twist, turn, hem, and haw, every which way but loose. It's too painful.

If he decided today, to accept that he doesn't know what he used to think he knew it would cost him - and cost him dearly. He would likely lose his family, "friends", peers, important business relationships, and perhaps his job (unless he stayed in the closet about it like the clergy project). Either way, the internal pain is too great to admit. I know, I was right there for over 5 years.

This is why I'm not opposed to continuing the dialogue - with his irrational responses or no. It's all part of the psychological process. His responses sound just like me 10 years ago! Change (especially of this kind) is HARD. And the fallacious arguments and/or obfuscations are just last ditch defense mechanisms which are ultimately based in continued denial - just as I went through. My prescription is to allow it to happen - while we keep pounding the logic hammer repeatedly. That's what it takes. Hearing the truth of reason over, and over, and over again (like a corrected math problem you keep getting wrong).

When it happened for me, I was forced to face reason, logic, and critical thinking on multiple fronts. It was slow, arduous, painful, and very saddening. But the truth was more important to me than an assumed belief from my parents. If he is truly honest with himself, and truly cares whether or not his beliefs are true, he will take a similar path. All I want to do is assist in the process b/c I now see how terrible irrational religious credulity is, and how we need to help people out of it.

Wayne's never seen Anfauglir and I going at it with hammer and tongs over the concept of free will, I take it.

I think the reason he's making this claim of "corporate evil" is because some people are making "slanderous and profane accusations", and the rest of us aren't challenging them on it. Presumably, these are calling his god a fantasy and accusing him of confirmation bias, based on a later post of his.

The thing is, though, it's up to him to show that his god isn't a fantasy of his. He's tried to do this by compiling a series of anecdotes, but anecdotal evidence isn't convincing in its own right. He's also claimed that his god must be hiding the evidence that would prove that his god really exists, which doesn't help his case at all.

As for confirmation bias, I'm reasonably convinced that he is engaging in it - and he's done most of the convincing by how he reacted to it. He accused other members of suffering from confirmation bias (which might be true, but he didn't back up these accusations with anything that would support his argument), he's steadfastly denied that he could be suffering from it (indicating that he's not even willing to consider the possibility that he might be), and he's absolutely certain that his episodes are the work of his god (without providing evidence that would back up that certainty to someone not directly involved, as he's tacitly admitted by saying it would be wrong of me - and others, presumably - to be certain about his episodes).

So, in short, it's no more unreasonable to consider Wayne's god a fantasy until he provides verifiable evidence back up that claim (and not something that can easily be attributed to coincidence) than it would be to conclude that the Wookees from Planet Kashyyyk, or Klingons from Planet Qo'noS, are also a fantasy when one can provide no proof of their existence. Indeed, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to support their existence, in the form of stories written about them, television shows and movies produced about them, etc. Far more anecdotal evidence than Wayne has. For all we know, they're secretly communicating via telepathy with the people who wrote those stories, but it would be up to them to show evidence if this were the case.

I'm sure Wayne would say that those are obviously fictional races that don't actually exist. However, there have been people who have claimed to be in telepathic contact with space aliens, or even that they were abducted by space aliens, yet who have been able to provide nothing more than anecdotal stories - that they nonetheless firmly believe to be true and convincing evidence of the existence of these space aliens, just as Wayne does - to support their claims. Wayne's argument is essentially that we should accept those anecdotes as evidence - as well as the certainty of the ones providing them - if we couldn't prove them wrong, as he's argued that we should accept his anecdotes and his certainty as evidence because we can't prove him wrong.

This is not a valid approach to determining whether claims are true or not. It would force us to accept many claims which were probably false, but which we couldn't be sure about. While that would be convenient for the people advancing those claims, it would be practically useless for any other purpose; we would have to waste a huge amount of time and energy following up on claims which were probably false, because we couldn't rule them out due to the dubious evidence provided to support them.

What we do, which is to assume such claims false until a person can provide verifiable evidence to support them, results in much less wasted time and effort. It's true, we may end up ruling out claims that could be true for lack of evidence, but better to do that and have the ones advancing those claims come up with additional evidence which may well prove their claim is true, than have to follow up on any number of dubious claims which are probably not true.

In short, Wayne, your job now is to find us some verifiable evidence that we can actually test out for ourselves to support your claim that your god is responsible for your episodes (rather than a purely natural cause which has nothing to do with any god at all). Until you can do that, you're just wasting your time and ours. And while I don't particularly mind the wasted time (posting here is a leisure activity for me), you aren't doing yourself any good by being stubborn and insisting that we should accept what you say anyway.

To Moderators, Wayne is going to post some things to me which he asked in PM. I request that my (public) conversation with him (here) be allowed to continue unhindered - so as to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I would prefer more dialogue rather than less (as I'd like to ride the current for a while and see what happens here).

Thank you,median

p.s. - Wayne, this message to the moderators should be clear evidence that I am NOT part of some "corporate evil". Again, just because I don't share your assumption about Yahweh doesn't mean that I agree on everything with every non-believer on the planet (or even in this forum for that matter). I am just as "new" as you are here.

To Moderators, Wayne is going to post some things to me which he asked in PM. < snip>

Wayne should answer the questions posed by other, before he is allowed to continue. He has stubbed the rules far too long.

If you wish to continue then you should do it via PMs. ( but even then it undermines the mods authority, and puts a finger up to the other members who been moderated themselves) To do it here, would be too completely ignore, the reasons he his being moderated.

He knows what he should do.

You asking the mods to be lenient, does nothing to get the man to obey the rules.

We are all held under the same discipline, why should he be give a special pass.

To the mods: Please do not allow this travesty from happening, thank you.

« Last Edit: March 11, 2013, 02:14:42 PM by bertatberts »

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We theists have no evidence for our beliefs. So no amount of rational evidence will dissuade us from those beliefs. - JCisall

It would be pretty piss poor brainwashing, if the victims knew they were brainwashed, wouldn't it? - Screwtape. 04/12/12

To Moderators, Wayne is going to post some things to me which he asked in PM. I request that my (public) conversation with him (here) be allowed to continue unhindered - so as to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I would prefer more dialogue rather than less (as I'd like to ride the current for a while and see what happens here).

Thank you,median

p.s. - Wayne, this message to the moderators should be clear evidence that I am NOT part of some "corporate evil". Again, just because I don't share your assumption about Yahweh doesn't mean that I agree on everything with every non-believer on the planet (or even in this forum for that matter). I am just as "new" as you are here.

Why does Wayne have to hide out in the PM netherworld? Why can't he just put up or shut up? If he wants to talk to one person with the rest of us observing, he can set up a debate or something. But if he is just scared of our insisting that he back up what he says with real evidence, well, he probably should stay hidden then.

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When all of Cinderella's finery changed back at midnight, why didn't the shoes disappear? What's up with that?

If I might suggest a compromise, create a thread (say in the Debate Room, or someplace else where it can be kept one-on-one) for median and Wayne to discuss things further. While bertaberts does have a point about what Wayne should do, the fact is that trying to force him to do it (by squelching him until he does answer those points) will only cause him to either act to circumvent moderator intervention through PMs as he's already done, or to withdraw from the site. Neither will actually solve anything.

If median is willing to take on discussing things with Wayne alone, then I see no particular problem with it, since it won't conflict with moderator approval of his posts. He'd still be restricted outside of this one thread, and it would be just him and median.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

If he decided today, to accept that he doesn't know what he used to think he knew it would cost him - and cost him dearly. He would likely lose his family, "friends", peers, important business relationships, and perhaps his job (unless he stayed in the closet about it like the clergy project). Either way, the internal pain is too great to admit. I know, I was right there for over 5 years.

My bold.

Not necessarily. I am happily in the closet at work because I like my job too much, and would certainly (and illegally) get fired if I were to engage and challenge christianity at work. Yes - rightly a hypocrite on my part - and yes, whole threads here at WWGHA have gone up and down and badly for we so accused. Ce la vie. Non-hypocrites are welcome to throw the first.... never mind.

If I might suggest a compromise, create a thread (say in the Debate Room, or someplace else where it can be kept one-on-one) for median and Wayne to discuss things further. While bertaberts does have a point about what Wayne should do, the fact is that trying to force him to do it (by squelching him until he does answer those points) will only cause him to either act to circumvent moderator intervention through PMs as he's already done, or to withdraw from the site. Neither will actually solve anything.

If median is willing to take on discussing things with Wayne alone, then I see no particular problem with it, since it won't conflict with moderator approval of his posts. He'd still be restricted outside of this one thread, and it would be just him and median.

Good idea there!

Moderators - how about it?

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No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

It been 36 page on this thread since Wayne came to it, he has yet to debate anybody, all he has done from the onset is post up his imaginings and ignore the questions that have been asked.

If you think it will be a one on one in a debate; "You have not been paying attention". He will just use it to push his premonitions/imaginings. Nothing whatsoever will change.

Let me reiterate, if median's willing to do it, and Wayne is willing to do it, then I see no good reason to forbid it. It's their time to spend, if it comes to it. Perhaps nothing will change if they go through with this - but I can practically guarantee nothing will change if they do not.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

Add my voice to those who wouldn't mind seeing this play out. As long as it it confined to the one thread, and Median is willing to put up with Wayne's tactics, then even if it turned out to be only illustrative of an exercise in frustration there could be value in that. We rarely get theists here as tenacious as Wayne, so even if there's a precedent set for putting up with things that the board as a whole does not allow, the fact that it IS contained in a single thread should ensure that it doesn't become disruptive, and I doubt it will open the floodgates for more of his ilk.

No problem, I have entered a challenge to him in the challenge section. I am awaiting approval? I think? Not sure how that works.

Thx,median

The way it normally works is one member posts a challenge in the debate thread. You should send a link to the challenged member to make sure he knows about it. Then, the other member accepts. The mod - me - makes a thread for the debate and one for non-participant commentary.

However, in this case Wayne is on moderated status. We are not going to approve any posts of his until he answers some rather simple questions. It is beyond me as to why he won't. Nobody has asked him to convince anyone he's right. Just back up some claims. Otherwise, he's just using this forum as a bullhorn. And it's not for that. It is for discussion. Discussion is two way.

Allowing him to start a whole separate conversation would be unfair to the people who have questions pending.

As one of those who has "questions pending", I would far, far prefer that he debate with median in a place where people can see it, than continue the stalemate that exists here. At least then there's a chance that they might be answered at some point in the future. As it stands right now, they won't be answered at all, and I think everyone knows that.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

I rather think Screwtape is right on this one. We ought not to set a precedent where a member can escape answering questions (and his moderation) by just starting gain in a debate. It gives a way out for preachers who really don't want to address hard question but who are happy to keep preaching.

Of course, in the case of Wayne, why would we have any expectation that we will have points answered by him in a debate when he hasn't addressed points on this thread? The chances are we would end up just the same as we are now but with two threads and not one.

A good idea now would be for a Mod to put in green the points to be asked and for the rest of us to hold fire while he answers some of them. Giving him a bit of space might help....

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No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

I suppose I have an optimistic streak which suggests that just possibly, not having quite so many pending questions hanging over his head might free Wayne up to address one issue at a time. And that if this approach does get us somewhere, some of the other questions might be brought up in time as well. Individually. If he simply continues his proselytizing, the thread can always be shut back down at that point.(oops...sorry for continuing off topic. I didn't see the warning before hitting send. Maybe this could all be moved to the atheist corner?)